Bureaucracy, potholes and politics hamper NATO’s defense efforts as the threat from Russia grows
As Russia invades Ukraine, Europe awakens to a new need to defend itself.
As Lithuanian children return to school this fall, some of their schools have been marked with new stickers: hundreds have been designated as bomb shelters.
In Finland, the defense forces are assembling modular military fortifications and practicing landing aircraft on highways.
Planners from the Baltic states in the north to Romania in the south are scrutinizing possible routes for military reinforcements, planning to reinforce bridges and add military transport functions to civilian airports, more than three dozen military and civilian officials in eight European countries told Reuters.
After 25 years of fighting conflicts abroad, the NATO alliance suddenly needs to show its enemy that it can respond to a threat anywhere on its borders, its top military adviser said.
And, according to him, he is not ready.
“Many, many nations — not just on the eastern flank, but many countries — lack infrastructure,” said Dutch Admiral Rob Bauer, who heads NATO’s military committee.
The European Union has said that Russia’s invasion of Ukraine has increased the need to adapt Europe’s transport infrastructure for dual civilian and defense use, and is accelerating funding for projects supporting military mobility.
Brussels has committed 1.6 billion euros ($2.48 billion) to military mobility projects across the bloc between 2021 and 2027. period, which is part of a larger €33.7 billion budget known as the Connecting Europe Facility to support major infrastructure projects.
The military mobility project is coordinated by the Netherlands, but its budget was reduced in the negotiations from the initial proposal of the EU Commission – 6.5 billion.
Admiral Bauer called the amount available “almost nothing”, while Raul Bessems, the Dutch government’s top official in charge of military mobility, said it would “never be enough”.
In response, a European Commission spokesman told Reuters that a new military mobility plan unveiled in November “will help Europe’s armed forces respond better, faster and with sufficient scale” to crises at the EU’s external borders.
“We have made great progress in recent months, but let’s face it, obstacles remain,” said EU foreign policy chief Josep Borrell.
Europe’s geopolitical situation has changed dramatically since NATO’s eastward expansion in 1991, with the fall of the Iron Curtain.
During the Cold War, Germany was the front line: the country where the battle between East and West would have taken place.
Today’s scenarios are more complex, planners say.
NATO’s territory has grown dramatically, meaning a longer border to protect, more room for potential Russian attacks, greater distances for military reinforcements to cover, and more potential attacks, including cyber attacks on infrastructure.
Military planners say that while the war has raised awareness, the lack of funding points to a larger concern: a European political mindset that Mr. Bessems says lags behind the reality of full-scale war on European soil and has yet to catch up. with the hybrid nature of modern warfare.
“Peacetime conditions apply. And that’s the whole problem,” he said.
If large reinforcements arrived from the Atlantic and needed to move quickly east, the obstacles would be a lack of rail capacity, roads that were too narrow and steep, insufficient information about roads and bridges, misaligned track gauges, and crippling bureaucracy. Ben Hodges, a retired Lt. General who until 2017 was the commander of the US Army in Europe and has been campaigning for better infrastructure for many years.
“We don’t have enough transport capacity or infrastructure to allow NATO forces to move quickly across Europe,” he said.
For example, he noted that the German railway, Deutsche Bahn, has enough railcars to transport one and a half armored brigades at a time: “That’s it.”
One armored brigade consists of about 4,000 soldiers, 90 Abrams tanks, 15 Paladin self-propelled howitzers (155 mm), 150 Bradley infantry fighting vehicles, 500 tracked vehicles and 600 wheeled vehicles and other equipment.
From a military point of view, planners need “redundancies”, multiple routes to offer alternatives if some are eliminated.
But road building is the responsibility of national governments, which face competing claims for expensive projects.
“What we learned from Russia’s war against Ukraine [that] we were reminded that war is a test of will and logistics,” General Hodges said.
Lithuanian school shelters
In the capital, Vilnius, the deputy head of administration, Adam Buzinskas, said the photographs of people hiding from bombs in Ukraine were taken to focus attention on his city, which was once ruled by Moscow and now belongs to both the European Union and NATO. own need for shelter.
Soviet-era shelters were remodeled in the city and nothing was built in their place.
“Nobody thought about it,” he said. “Now it’s obvious: it wasn’t smart.”
The basement of Jeruzales Progymnasium, a school on a residential Vilnius street, is a boot room where children clamour for coats and shoes at break.
It’s also one of 370 locations the city has marked as shelters.
Together, they could house up to 210,000 people — just one third of the city’s population, Mr Buzinskas said.
The cloakroom is designated as a shelter for the neighbourhood, but headmaster Linas Vasarevicius said it would hardly have space for all the school’s 700 pupils.
‘Strong, ugly and fast’ fortifications in Finland
Finland — which the Soviet Union tried to invade in World War II and which applied to join NATO earlier this year — has long honed its independent military readiness.
It has set aside an initial 145 million euros to begin fencing critical parts of its border with Russia, until now just a conceptual line through vast forests.
To rehearse for the possibility of another attempted invasion by Russia, it’s building different types of fortifications around the country, using sandbags filled with rock dust and modular elements in concrete and wood, designed by the defence forces to be built and moved quickly.
“We build them strong, ugly and fast,” said Jouko Viitala, who heads special projects at infrastructure builder GRK.
Helsinki fears retaliation for its NATO application could come in the form of Russia sending masses of migrants to the border, as the EU accused Belarus of doing in 2021, when Minsk distributed Belarusian visas in the Middle East and thousands of migrants got stuck on the Polish-Belarussian border.
Finland’s air force — which ordered a new fleet of F-35s for $US9.4 billion ($14.2 billion) last December — practise landing and take-off on a dozen reserve road runways every year.
Its air force has a strategy of dispersing and hiding aircraft across the country in case of a threat, commander of the Airforce Academy, Colonel Vesa Mantyla, said.
Highway landings may work in sparsely populated Finland but, in a crisis, fighter jets landing on highways elsewhere in Europe would compete with other traffic.
Once a crisis begins, General Hodges said, the roads are needed for heavy trucks, tracked vehicles carrying ammunition and fuel — and, potentially, millions of people heading in the opposite direction.
Changing trains
Physically transporting tanks, trucks and soldiers to reinforce a frontline further east is a challenge.
On a foggy October morning, a Czech army train of 18 railroad cars, loaded with tanks, trucks and 730 personnel, stopped for more than 18 hours at the small Sestokai rural station in Lithuania, next to the Polish border, on the way to a military exercise.
The stop was needed to load the equipment and personnel onto a different train, because the railway tracks in the Baltic nations were laid by Russia and are 8.5 centimetres wider than the standard gauge in most of continental Europe.
A crane transferred the tanks and trucks, while a dozen railway workers spent more than two hours securing the vehicles to the rail cars.
By 2030, a 5.8-billion-euro, high-speed rail track financed by the European Union, RailBaltica, is slated to connect Warsaw with the Baltic capitals Vilnius, Riga and Tallinn, but only 1.2 billion euros has been allocated so far.
Russia’s military is using broad-gauge railway in Ukraine to supply its troops there: Having the same gauge as Russia is a security concern for the Baltics, Lithuania’s Foreign Minister Gabrielius Landsbergis argued in August.
Eesti Raudtee — the state-owned rail track operator in Estonia — has already advised its government against rebuilding its railway tracks, saying the switch would cost 8.7 billion euros and cause major disruptions to rail traffic.
“The only way to switch to the European track gauge would be to construct a parallel railroad system next to the existing one,” Kaido Zimmermann, chief executive of the company, told public broadcaster ERR, “and then tear up the existing one.”
Mind the Suwalki Gap
On the highway map of Europe, the western zone is dense with roads.
At the former border between West and East Germany, these thin out to three or four highways, and there’s just one highway going to the Baltics.
That connection between the Baltics and the rest of Europe is a 100-kilometre-long stretch of land along the Polish-Lithuanian border known as the Suwalki Gap.
The sparsely populated area, covered by farmland and low hills, is a strategic site in case of war.
Its takeover by Russia would isolate the Baltic states from the rest of NATO.
The Suwalki Gap “is one of the things we seriously look at”, Admiral Bauer said, noting that NATO had plans to get forces there quickly.
That will be easier with investments already underway, including expanding via Baltica — a road connecting Warsaw and Tallinn — into a four-lane highway.
The project — priced more than 1 billion euros — is envisaged for completion by 2035, but most of financing has not been lined up yet.
Eight months into Russia’s Ukraine campaign, the site where the borders of Russia, Lithuania and Poland meet was quiet — rarely frequented even by border guards — said Mieczyslaw Ceglarski, a 66-year-old pensioner, pausing as he rode an old bicycle past the dozen farmhouses of the Polish village, Bolcie.
“The thought that someone could cross the border and fight us doesn’t even cross my mind,” he said.
Even so, in early November, Poland said it would build a new razor-wire fence on the Russian border behind Mr Ceglarski’s house, to prevent a destabilising influx of migrants.
Solidarity Transport Hub
If the West cannot stop Russia in Ukraine, Poland believes it would be the next target, so is working hard to improve its infrastructure.
The Baltic connections will be part of a 35-billion-euro effort to improve military mobility across central Europe, known as the Solidarity Transport Hub.
According to Marcin Horala — the Polish government’s plenipotentiary responsible for overseeing the hub’s construction — it is one of the most important projects underway in central and eastern Europe for military and civilian use.
“When it comes to the ability to absorb troops and air supplies, the Solidarity Hub is a breakthrough,” he said.
“It will be a place where large tactical connections, large amounts of ammunition, supplies and logistics can be taken to Poland very quickly.”
The hub will include a new Solidarity Airport with an adjacent military base and an integrated rail and road system that will shorten transfer time between Warsaw and the largest Polish cities to less than two-and-a-half hours.
If all goes as planned, the investment will be completed in 2028.
As part of the program, by 2034, Poland will build 2,000 kilometres of railways, plus expressways and structures including bridges to make the transport system more resistant to attacks.
However, a report by Poland’s Supreme Audit Office in January 2022 said that, as a result of bad planning, sections of the project might be delayed by up to two-and-a-half years.
And the main opposition in Poland, the Civic Platform, argues against the hub, promising an audit of the investment if it wins elections next year.
Passport control
Plus, there’s paperwork.
In principle, peacetime regulations are waived in war, but that is a political decision.
Conflict today can be hybrid and politicians may not agree to cut out red tape in time.
In November, a group of French tanks headed through Germany to Romania was not approved because the weight of the tanks exceeded road traffic regulations, a spokesperson for Germany’s Territorial Command said.
On a drill involving Hungary, Romania, and Bulgaria, General Hodges said, US troops were flown to Bulgaria to practise capturing an airfield.
The organisers discovered that the Bulgarian government was planning to inspect the passports of paratroopers after they parachuted in.
“We had made the mistake,” he said.
“All of our interaction was with the Ministry of Defence, and other ministries have a role to play also.”
Brigadier General Henny Bouman — who is heading up a project on military mobility between the EU, US, Canada and Finland — said bureaucracy and local regulations are the main obstacle to rapid military deployment in Europe.
“In every nation you see a lot of regulations,” General Bouman said.
“Bureaucracy. That’s my biggest concern.”
The final miles …
At the moment, any effort to speed troops to the east won’t prevent them from getting stuck on the final miles: the pot-holed roads of Romania.
Gravel and dirt roads account for about 28 per cent of the country’s roads, according to data from its National Statistics Board.
Motorways account for only 5.3 per cent of Romania’s road network.
Only 11 per cent of roads have four lanes.
“You have troops, that is nice, you have heavy equipment you must transport on roads, but which roads?” Bucharest adviser to the president of the German Marshall Fund, Alina Inayeh, said.
With a population of 19 million, the EU’s ninth-largest state by land area had less than 1,000 km of motorway in 2021, compared with 13,192 km in Germany.
“We’ve discovered — through exercises over the last few years — that the further east you go, it becomes more difficult because the infrastructure is not as robust, or redundant,” General Hodges said.
He has argued that countries could be incentivised to invest in infrastructure with military potential if this were deemed to count as a contribution to their overall defence spending.
That would help them meet the target agreed by NATO members of defence spending at 2 per cent of Gross Domestic Product.
But Romania already meets that target.
“The bridges that can hold a modern Abrams tank or [a] Leopard or [a] “British Challenger – not many bridges can support that weight,” he said.
Access is hampered by a crumbling bridge in central Romania’s Brasov county, where a new NATO battle group led by French troops has been established at the Cincu military base.
The nearly seven-decade-old Voila Bridge cannot support light traffic, let alone tanks and armored personnel carriers.
All traffic has been stopped, Voila’s mayor said, and the new bridge won’t be finished until next year.
A French tank convoy that was too heavy for German roads in November had to find an alternative route from Voila railway station to the military base and extend it by several hours, a Defense Ministry spokesman said.
France’s defense ministry told Reuters it was aware that infrastructure was hampering mobility and had sent its investment priorities to the transport ministry.
This year, it submitted 11 road transport projects for dual military and civilian use for funding under the Connecting Europe programme.
Reuters
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